Network Watcher

The Network Watcher tool may not be considered an actual monitoring tool, but it can be used in this way (to a limited capacity). In short, it’s a service in Azure that empowers you to monitor and diagnose network issues; whether that is to, from, or in Azure networking; or also provide insights into your Azure networks.

Real Word Example

With Azure Network Watcher the real power is in analysis and troubleshooting.

In the real-world, it’s a very helpful tool to be able to troubleshoot connections, packet flows, Network Security Groups (NSGs), etc. So it’s more of a “what’s happening right now” than a “what’s happened in the past” toolset. With that being said, as per the above-referenced Ignite session, a lot of the Operations Management Suite (OMS) network monitoring solutions are being brought into the Network Watcher umbrella (similar to the OMS Security solutions are rolling into Azure Security Center).

So you can use it to dig into IP flow between a source and destination systems…

Network Watcher – IP Flow Verify

… check what Network Security Groups are applied (either to a VNet/Subnet, or the Virtual Machine’s NIC)…

Network Watcher – Security Group View

… and connectivity checks between systems, to name a few.

Network Watcher – Connectivity Check

Conclusion

To sum up, Network Watcher is not really a “monitoring” tool as we’re used to. But, with the announcements from Ignite, all other network monitoring tools will be brought into Network Watcher as a central pane. So, we will be able to troubleshoot current/live issues, as well as collect and view historic data.

The next tool in our series will be the Operations Management Suite (OMS); also known as Log Analytics.